Up to four memory buses may be purchased. The Columbia system has two memory buses. If a high-speed buffered data channel is used, block transfer may occur at memory cycle speeds. With two buses, data may be stored in two memory modules at rates up to twice memory speed.
circuits which "clock" an input event from one of the detectors to the nearest clock pulse following its arrival, a 50-mHz counter, and a 16-word derandomizing buffer capable of storing a new word of data every 20 nsec. Thus, new data may be stored on, or old data retrieved from, the disk or magnetic tape; either new or old data may be displayed on the CRT; and the same or other data may be output with the plotter or line printer. Control information will be input from the teletype, the operator's console, or from special-purpose switches. The importance to the physicist is that hard copy output is immediately available during data acquisition and may be used to monitor, or modify, the experiment.
It has been hoped that the system would be used extensively for the analysis of previously acquired data, beginning shortly after delivery; however, very little such use has proved possible, essentially because of the unreliability of the 100-cpm card reader supplied by EMR. The lack of a line printer was also a factor. A more reliable reader has been purchased. The delivery of a line printer should rectify the second need.